The LMS market has evolved significantly over the last decade or so. And there probably are more than 250 LMS systems in circulation around the world. While the large LMS systems are simply out-of-reach of a majority of businesses, most of the small LMS systems don’t necessarily have all the necessary features your business needs for efficient and effective learning management – be it for internal staff or for your customers. To top it all, varied and complicated pricing models make it nothing short of a herculean task to identify and select the right LMS – one that has the necessary and also forward-looking features, is available as a SaaS and is priced with you in mind.

After the recent recognition of Upside Learning as one of the top 20 Learning portal companies in the world by trainingindustry.com, Sébastien FRAYSSE of lms-selection.com interviewed us and put it up here on his blog with the title LMS Vendor interview: Upside Learning.

In his post Sébastien highlights what is part of our core philosophy – innovation – “Upside Learning is a very innovative vendor”.

This year has been truly remarkable for UpsideLMS.

First, there were the 3 awards from Brandon Hall Awards for Excellence in Learning Technology, then it was Brandon Hall, chairman of Brandon Hall Research, naming UpsideLMS amongst the ‘Five Emerging Learning Management Systems (LMSs) to Watch’ in Chief Learning Officer (CLO) Magazine, and now its TrainingIndustry.com featuring Upside Learning in its inaugural ‘Top 20 Learning Portal Companies List’. We are on a roll and how!

About almost an entire year ago (just  five days short to be precise) I put up a post on Learning Management: What does a Training Company need an LMS for?.  A year on and I was trying to review if things have changed significantly in for what a training company (or even an SMB) would need from an LMS in today’s scenario.

The good news first: the market is upbeat about LMS technology; in the recent past I have seen an increasing number of enquiries on LMS – which is good.

The ‘not so bad’ news, something which made me think a little – in many RFPs I still find eLearning is a very small part of the requirements. In fact a couple of RFPs from very large organizations were similar in defining what they need from an LMS. I noticed that more than half of the requirements catered to managing classroom training. There was a low-key section on eLearning mentioning SCORM compliance in the RFP and that was about it!

I am pleased to share that our flagship and award-winning Learning Management System, UpsideLMS, has been named as one of the “Five Emerging Learning Management Systems (LMSs) to Watch” by Brandon Hall,  chairman of Brandon Hall Research in Chief Learning Officer magazine’s July 2010 edition.  UpsideLMS is a fully-featured social learning management system offering integrated support for formal and informal learning.

The LMS has been a hot discussion topic for some time now. There have been posts discussing its survival and a few posts before that discussing its future – Jane Hart posted what is the future of the lms reviewing useful of LMS, followed up by a similar post by Harold Jarche suggesting LMS is no longer the centre of the universe. Clark Quinn brought in a little balance by highlighting what the LMS could be used for and to what extent in his post – a case for the LMS.

I wanted to do a quick SWOT analysis of the LMS to get some understanding on the LMS scenario today.

Here is a very quick SWOT analysis of the LMS:

The future of elearning is mobile. Even with the present challenges mobile learning of non-standard screens, operating systems, browser support there is no real doubt that mobile learning is fast becoming widely accepted to deliver and help manage activities around learning delivery.

Just very recently Google announced the release of CloudCourse, calling it both an internal learning platform and also a course scheduling system. Built entirely on Google’s App Engine, it is primarily a scheduling platform which integrates with Google Calendar. From the videos and the pages put up on the link http://code.google.com/p/cloudcourse/, I could only figure out that it is a basic scheduling tool and not quite there to call it a learning platform.

During the time I posted my last post – The LMS – Will it survive? and continuing after that, there have been some interesting discussions around LMS by Clark Quinn, Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, Dave Wilkins and others debating the need of an LMS, raising questions from why we need it, whether we need it, how it should be viewed, will it survive, etc. You can read some interesting posts around these questions here – LMS is no longer the center of the universe, What is the future of the LMS?, When to LMS, A case for the LMS?, Why bash the LMS?, A Defense of the LMS (and a case for the future of Social Learning).

It seemed the LMS was under fire recently from many corners and questions were being raised about its very future – Jane Hart recently posted what is the future of the lms reviewing the useful of an LMS, followed up by a similar post by Harold Jarche suggesting the LMS is no longer the centre of the universe.

Clark Quinn brought in a little balance by highlighting what the LMS could be used for and to what extent in his post – a case for the LMS.

Moodle is a good LMS with which has grown over the years and offers a host of functionality and features that are very useful to have in an LMS. Add to it the fact that its open source which makes it free to use, has made it very popular.

Moodle has been able to sustain itself and keep evolving through its community, resulting in its emergence as a good option for anyone wanting to use an LMS. But is Moodle or any other open source LMS (there are a few good ones like the ones mentioned here) really free? Though they may be free at a tangible expense level, they do carry a cost which the organization implementing the LMS should be aware and careful of.